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BOOK EXCERPT
"Declining by Degrees"
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From "READY OR NOT? WHERE THE PUBLIC STANDS ON HIGHER EDUCATION REFORM"
by Deborah Wadsworth
... As noted earlier, people have consistently stressed the importance of higher education. At the same time, they also tended to say that a college education was not the only path to success in America. Many people point to the success of individuals such as Bill Gates (a college dropout) to show that even though higher education is important, it is still possible to become the richest person in the world without a degree. The 2003 Public Agenda survey also found a change in this area. The study shows a small but significant growth in the number of people who believe that college is not only important but also essential, and a falling off (from 67 to 61 percent) in the percentage who think that it is still possible to make it without a higher education degree. Although the perceived importance of a college education has been consistently high, we now see, in other words, a growth in the belief of the necessity of a higher education as well.
Taken together, the two items - the perceived decline of availability and concomitant greater necessity of a higher education - create a kind of "misery index" borrowing the term coined in the 1970s to describe the convergence of inflation and unemployment. If college is increasingly viewed as absolutely essential and simultaneously less available, American society is approaching a much more unstable situation. Our society is predicated on an ideology of social mobility. At the heart of that tenet is the belief that hard work will pay off and that people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It follows, then, that if higher education becomes the only path to success and, at the same time, less available to significant numbers of individuals, that sense of mobility will be threatened. ...
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MEET ADRIANA, JASON, MATT & BRITNEY
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